Impact Leadership Development Group Blog

The best managers have a fundamentally different understanding of workplace, company, and team dynamics. See what they get right.

A few years back, I interviewed some of the most successful CEOs in the world in order to discover their management secrets. I learned that the "best of the best" tend to share the following eight core beliefs.

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We are frequently asked about the value/impact of online development programs.  Certainly, as the economy continues to struggle, organizations are considering more cost effective ways to provide leadership education to their people.  Often the prospect of doing some form of "online learning" seems to be the first option that receives attention.

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Rosabeth Moss Kanter, best known for her books the Change Masters and Men & Women of the Corporation, has published another worthwhile book on corporate life based on interviews of over 350 key people at major corporations worldwide. Her main theory? That businesses which are agile, keeping ahead of the curve in terms of market changes and customer needs, are the businesses that are also progressive, socially responsible “human communities”. Kanter calls these successful companies “vanguard companies” because they use their unique strengths to provide innovative new solutions to a variety of societal challenges.

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With the possible exceptions of the Internet and e-commerce, not many things in business have increased in popularity more than the concept of teamwork.  I have been working with, and studying teamwork and the leadership of teams for about thirty years and I have witnessed a transformation in organizational interest in using teams to accomplish work.  Not all of this change has been for the good.

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Before we talk about high performance teamwork, let's talk about cars.  I have always admired Mercedes-Benz automobiles.  Mercedes provides an extraordinary driving experience.  There is, however, a fairly significant obstacle to overcome in obtaining this extraordinary driving experience:  cost.  A Mercedes is expensive to buy and to maintain.  But I really like the Mercedes driving experience.

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Those three words, direction, vision, and dream, describe the first and foremost responsibility of leadership.  Before we can expect concerted individual effort, or group work, or team work, there must be a clear picture of where we are headed.  As the old expression goes, "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there."  And while the creation of the direction, vision or dream can be done in many ways, the responsibility for ensuring it is in place rests solely with the leader.

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The third and final column in this series about designing, or redesigning, certain elements in the workplace to enhance team effectiveness focuses on the organizational systems which provides the context for team work.  Everyone is impacted by organizational systems whether we recognize them or not.

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As I begin to write, I pause to take in the view.  I am sitting on the balcony of a winery / guest hotel in St. Cyr sur Mer, France.  Facing the south, I see before me the rolling hills of the vineyards with their unique rocky soils, a few scattered farm houses and barns, and forested hills off to my left.  Beyond the last hills, about three kilometers away, lies the azure Mediterranean Sea.  The temperature is a pleasant 20 degrees.

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Sometimes our intuition takes us down the wrong road.  That is why there are maps and that is why we do research.  For example, many people have painted a mental picture of managers as reclusive bureaucrats, holed up in some cubicle, having little or no contact with real people.  On the other hand, leaders are often thought to be out in the public eye, constantly surrounded with throngs of followers, spending all their time working with other people.  Unfortunately for our mental models, research has found this not to be exactly the case, even though there are grains of truth in both.

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Setting goals is one of the few things in the leadership and management realm that everybody seems to think is a good idea.  Articles and books on the subject abound.  Researchers love the findings because they are so plentiful and consistent with about 1000 current references in print.  Practitioners could care less about the multitude of studies since their own experience tells them the same thing: goal setting works to enhance performance.

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In the world of organizations in which many of us live, be they small or huge, the words leadership and management crop up all the time.  So it seems that in this first column, it might be appropriate to consider just what we mean by these terms, anyway.  Neither term is new, but both are often misunderstood.

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The best organizations today are learning organizations.  With the highly turbulent environments in which we find ourselves today, organizations can't afford to make the same mistake twice.  In fact, organizations today can't afford to make the same mistake that other organizations have made before.  If anyone has learned something that will benefit us today, we need to know about it and learn from it.  As the philosopher, George Santayana said, "Those who can't remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

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